Show Us Your Human Interface; Win Laser Cutting Time

July 9, 2015 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Our newest Hot List is Human Interfaces. This is anything you’ve designed into your project to interact with people. And we want to see it all! Do you have something bristling with buttons, boasting many LCD screens, hosting controls organized with the principles of Feng Shui, or intuitively voice activated? Show us the user interface you’re proud of and you could win one of thirty $100 gift cards for Ponoko laser cutting service.

We’re in the thick of judging the Wheels, Wings, and Propellers hot list from this week. We’ll be announcing the rankings in the coming days, but for now you need to get your project onto the Your Human Interface hot list. Here’s what you need to do before Thursday, 7/16/15:

Officially enter your project in the 2015 Hackaday Prize
Go to this discussion and leave a comment requesting that your project to be added to the list

Good luck, and per usually we’d like to encourage you to Vote this week. It’s a great way to explore the entries in this year’s 2015 Hackaday Prize, and you just might win $1000 from the Hackaday Store just for voting!

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Hack-a-Day Logo Laser Light Show

November 24, 2013 by Todd Harrison No comments

The Hack-a-Day logo challenge keeps on bearing fruit. This tip comes from [Enrico Lamperti] from Argentina who posted his follies as well as success creating a Hack-a-Day logo using a home built scanning laser projector.

The build consists of a couple small servos, a hacked up pen laser and an Arduino with some stored coordinates to draw out the image. As usual the first challenge is powering your external peripheral devices like servos. [Enrico] tackled this problem using 6 Ni-MH batteries and an LM2956 simple switcher power converter. The servos and Arduino get power directly from the battery pack and the Arduino controls the PWM signals to the servos as they trace out the stored coordinate data. The laser is connected to the servo assembly and is engaged and powered by an Arduino pin via an NPN transistor. He also incorporated a potentiometer to adjust the servo calibration point.

His first imported coordinate data generated from some Python script was not very successful. But later he used processing with an SVG file to process a click-made path the Arduino could use as map data to draw the Hack-a-Day logo. It requires a long exposure time to photograph the completed drawing in a dark room but the results are impressive.

It’s an excellent project where [Enrico] shares what he learned about using Servo.writeMicroseconds() instead of Servo.write() for performance along with several other tweaks. He also shared the BOM, Fritzing diagram, Processing Creator and Simulator tools and serial commands on GitHub. He wraps up with some options that he thinks would improve his device, and he requests any help others may want to provide for better performance. And if you want you could step it up a notch and create a laser video projector with an ATMega16 AVR microcontroller and some clever spinning tilted mirrors.

Laser Light Show Comes To Life From The Junk Bin

September 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

In a project that only spanned about three weeks [Lars] built this laser light show projector using parts scavenged from his junk bin. We’ve seen the concept many times before, all you need is a laser source and two mirrors mounted on a spinning bases. The laser diode for this project was pulled from a recordable DVD player. That beam passes through the optics from a laser printer to give it the focus necessary to get a good projected image.

[Lars] played around with the mirror angles until he achieved just the right look. The first mirror is mounted about 4 degrees from being flat with its motorized base; the second is off by about 6 degrees. This introduces slight oscillation in the beam direction when the motors are spinning. By adjusting the speed of each motor you get different patterns. Adjustments are happening completely at random thanks to the BasicStamp2 microcontroller which hadn’t been used in years. Fifteen lines of code were all it took.

Want a laser that’s not controlled at random? Check out this addressable galvanometer-based show.

Analog Scope Stands In To For Laser Light Show

April 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Joey] likes to dabble in laser projection, building his own hardware and writing the software that drives it. One way that he tests his setup is by replacing the laser assembly with an analog oscilloscope. This allows him to ensure that the driver board is receiving data from the software, and translating it into the correct electrical signals to drive the motors controlling the mirrored redirection of the laser beam.

In the video linked above [Joey] walks us through this process. It starts by connecting scope probes to the digital-analog-converter card that outputs image data for the projector. From there the XY mode is used to map the two channels perpendicular to each other; the motors that these signals are meant to control have mirrors that also move perpendicular to one another. After adjusting the scale and the timebase you will see the pattern the laser dot is meant to trace.

[Joey] entered this in a Tectronix contest. There’s plenty of other interesting entries to browse though. If have an entry that you’d like to see featured, or if you come across any other interesting stuff, don’t forget to tip us off.

Laser Light Show Features Full XY Control Via Homemade Galvanometers

March 16, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

[Rich] over at NothingLabs has put together a really cool laser light show that you really must see in an effort to win a laser cutter from Instructables.

His walkthrough discusses the mechanics of laser light shows – specifically how galvanometers are typically used to precisely aim mirrors in order to draw images and write text. Commercial galvanometers tend to be pretty expensive, so he opted to build his own, using relatively cheap and easy to find parts.

The galvanometers were constructed using a pair of old speaker woofers, a few Lego bricks, and some acrylic mirror squares. The mirrors were mounted on the speakers, which were then wired to an Arduino. He removed the batteries from a cheap red laser pointer and permanently wired it to the Arduino, which it now uses as a pulsed power source. Once he had everything built, he positioned the laser using a fog machine for guidance.

As you can see in the video below, the laser show is quite impressive. His homemade galvos provide a somewhat rough quality to the final projected image, and we like that a lot. It looks almost as if all of the text and images were hand drawn, which is a pretty cool effect.

Just as [Rich] mentions, we hope to see some cool hacks based off his work in the future.

If you are interested in some of our previous laser features, check these out.

Continue reading “Laser Light Show Features Full XY Control Via Homemade Galvanometers” →

DIY Laser Light Show Is Sure To Please

March 13, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

cigarbox_laserlightshow

[Pete] had some spare time on his hands over his spring break, and he was itching to build something. He settled on a laser light show since, after all it was spring break, and what says “Party” better than a laser light show?

He glued three hobby mirrors to three small motors, mounting the motor assemblies on the lid of a wooden cigar box he bought for next to nothing. When the laser is pointed at the mirrors, they reflect the beam off one another, and finally against a projection surface, creating interesting shapes and motion. He programmed an Atmega328 to control the laser light show when in automatic mode, and added 4 pots to control the mirrors’ spin rate when set in manual mode.

The visuals are pretty cool, as you can see in the videos below. We love the laser light show concept, and [Pete] definitely gets extra points for his cigar-box casing as well.

Continue reading “DIY Laser Light Show Is Sure To Please” →

Fail Of The Week: A Potentially Lethal Tattoo Removal Laser Power Supply

March 24, 2024 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Caveat emptor is good advice in general, but in the wilds of eBay, being careful with what you buy could be life-saving. To wit, we present [Les Wright]’s teardown and very ginger power-up of an eBay tattoo-removal laser power supply.

Given that [Les] spent all of around $100 on this widowmaker, we’re pretty sure he knew what he was getting himself into. But he likely wasn’t quite prepared for the scale of the sketchiness this thing would exhibit. The deficiencies are almost too many to number, starting with the enclosure, which is not only made completely of plastic but assembled from individual sheets of flat plastic stock that show signs of being glued together by hand. Even the cooling water tank inside the case is pieced together this way, which probably led to the leaks that corroded the PCBs. Another assembly gem is the pair of screws the big energy storage capacitor is jammed under, presumably to hold it in place — because nothing says quality like a BOM that can’t spring for a couple of cable ties. Click through the break to read more and see the video.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: A Potentially Lethal Tattoo Removal Laser Power Supply” →